Erasing Black history is erasing America's future

Time of India

04-06-2025

Debashis Chakrabarti is a political columnist, Commonwealth Fellow (UK), and internationally recognized academic whose career bridges journalism, policy, and higher education leadership. A former journalist with The Indian Express, he brings the precision of investigative reporting to his political analysis and scholarly work. He has served as Professor and Dean at leading institutions across the UK, India, Africa, and the Middle East, with expertise in media studies, political communication, and governance. LESS ... MORE
'Those who control the past control the future. Those who control the present control the past.'
— George Orwell, 1984
When Donald Trump declared that he wanted to 'make America great again,' few questioned whose America he was referring to. But today, as he and his ideological allies attempt to erase the historical trauma and triumphs of Black Americans, it's become chillingly clear: this project of erasure is not just political — it's existential.
The president's campaign to dismantle the teaching of Black history is no longer covert. Through measures like banning critical race theory, censoring educational curricula, and prohibiting books that centre on enslaved people's experiences, Trump is attempting to rewrite America's historical DNA — bleaching it of its multiracial struggles and resistance.
A dangerous revisionism in the classroom
Across states like Florida, Texas, and now others emboldened by Trump-aligned governors, educational boards are implementing directives that portray slavery as 'involuntary relocation' and the civil rights movement as an ideological dispute rather than a fight for justice. Even AP African American Studies has come under attack, accused of being 'woke indoctrination.' Scholars and historians have condemned these acts as a form of state-sponsored amnesia.
The goal? To promote a version of American history that sanitises white dominance and expunges the enduring legacy of Black resistance is not mere revisionism—it is an assault on historical truth. It flatters whiteness not as fact, but as myth, while rendering invisible the generations who fought, bled, and built the moral conscience of this nation.'
Erasing Black history is silencing Black futures
Trump's cultural counter-revolution doesn't merely distort the past. It suffocates the intellectual space that Black youth need to understand their identity, heritage, and power. In doing so, it enacts a new form of disenfranchisement: psychological, educational, and political.
This is a strategy not unfamiliar in history. 'If you can control a man's thinking,' wrote Carter G. Woodson in his seminal 1933 work The Mis-Education of the Negro, 'you do not have to worry about his actions.' Woodson, the architect of Black History Month, understood that historical erasure is never accidental—it is strategic. When the state systematically strips away stories of Black resistance and resilience, it does more than distort the past; it conditions the future. In place of empowered memory, it cultivates manufactured docility—history weaponised not to educate, but to pacify. We must ask: what happens to a generation deprived of its memory?
The TikTok generation must refuse amnesia
To Gen Z — who are reshaping activism through hashtags, viral videos, and digital resistance — the erasure of Black history is not just a policy shift; it is a threat to collective identity. Your bodies have marched in protests, your voices have called out injustice, and your creativity has birthed cultural revolutions — from Black Lives Matter to the global resonance of Juneteenth.
You inherit not just a history of oppression, but a legacy of defiance — from Harriet Tubman's underground networks to James Baldwin's prophetic pens, from Fred Hampton's revolutionary visions to Beyoncé's unapologetic artistry.
Now is the time to weaponise memory. If the state forbids certain books, read them louder. If your classrooms whitewash slavery, repaint it with truth. If they fear your knowledge, make it go viral.
Black history is American history
Let's be clear: what is under attack is not a niche academic subfield but the very soul of America. The attempt to delete the narrative of Black struggle and contribution is an attack on the constitution's promises, on democracy's foundations, and on the moral conscience of a nation.
The United States cannot claim greatness while severing its ties to the history of Black labor, Black thought, and Black dreams. As Nikole Hannah-Jones rightly argued in The 1619 Project, it is from the shackles of slavery that America's founding contradictions are most visible — and from Black resistance that its promises are most vividly pursued.
The choice is ours
This is not just Trump's war. It is an orchestrated campaign to distort truth, erase historical memory, and undermine the very foundations of justice. And it will be won or lost not only in courtrooms and Congress, but in libraries, classrooms, living rooms, and on TikTok feeds.
To young Black Americans: the future belongs to those who remember.
Not because remembrance comes easily — but because the cost of forgetting is irreparable.
Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author's own.